Chesapeake Capes (1)

Background

By early 1781, Virginia, a state that until then had seen little military activity beyond raids from the sea, became a gathering point for both loyalist and rebel forces. Command of the British side there fell first to the defector Benedict Arnold, then passed to William Phillips, until Earl Cornwallis reached the colony toward the end of May, bringing his southern army with him to assume overall command.

That June found Cornwallis marching his troops to Williamsburg. There he received a muddled set of instructions from Sir Henry Clinton, which eventually settled on one clear demand: establish a deep-water port that could be fortified and used for resupply from the sea. Acting on these instructions, Cornwallis relocated to Yorktown near the close of July, and his men set to work constructing defenses. With British soldiers now stationed there and Clinton insisting on a harbor at that location, control of the Chesapeake became a vital naval prize that both sides needed to secure.

Meanwhile, on the 21st of May, Washington, at the head of the Continental Army, sat down with Rochambeau, who commanded the Expédition Particulière, inside the Vernon House in Newport, Rhode Island. Their purpose was to weigh possible strikes against British and Loyalist forces. Two main options emerged from their talks: striking directly at New York City, the main British stronghold, through either assault or siege, or turning their attention instead to the British presence in Virginia. Because carrying out either plan depended on support from the French fleet currently stationed in the West Indies, the generals sent a vessel to locate Lieutenant général de Grasse, who was due to arrive at Cap-Français, the port now called Cap-Haïtien in Haiti. The message laid out both possible courses of action and asked for his help. Separately, Rochambeau sent de Grasse a confidential note revealing that he personally favored the Virginia option. Following this, Washington and Rochambeau shifted their combined forces to White Plains, New York, where they intended to examine the city's defenses while they waited to hear back from de Grasse.

Arrival of the fleets

On 15 August, De Grasse reached Cap-Français and promptly sent word back to Rochambeau, confirming his intention to head for the Chesapeake. His fleet, numbering 28 ships of the line, put to sea from Cap-Français carrying 3,200 troops aboard. To keep his movements hidden, he steered clear of the customary sea routes, reaching the entrance of Chesapeake Bay on 30 August and landing his troops there to strengthen the ground siege against Cornwallis. His sudden appearance caught two British frigates by surprise, sealing them inside the bay and keeping New York's British command in the dark about the true scale of his forces until it was far too late to react.

Sir George Rodney, the British Admiral of the Blue, had been shadowing De Grasse throughout the West Indies and learned of his departure, though he could not determine where the French were headed. Convinced that De Grasse intended to send part of his fleet back across the Atlantic, Rodney assigned Rear-Admiral Sir Samuel Hood fourteen ships of the line and instructed him to locate the French destination in North America. Rodney himself, suffering from illness, set sail for Europe with his remaining vessels to recuperate, repair his ships, and steer clear of hurricane season.

Hood, taking a straighter course than his French counterpart, reached the mouth of the Chesapeake on 25 August. Seeing no French vessels there, he continued on toward New York. During this time, Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Graves, commanding the New York fleet, had spent weeks attempting to catch a convoy assembled by John Laurens meant to deliver essential supplies and currency from France to Boston. By the time Hood reached New York, Graves had returned to port, his pursuit unsuccessful, with just five ships of the line prepared for combat.

De Grasse had already informed Barras, his counterpart stationed at Newport, of both his plans and his expected arrival. On 27 August, Barras departed Newport with eight ships of the line, four frigates, and eighteen transport vessels loaded with French weaponry and siege supplies. He chose an indirect path deliberately, hoping to avoid any confrontation should the British fleet leave New York in pursuit. Around this same period, on 24 August, Washington and Rochambeau moved their forces across the Hudson, purposely leaving a portion behind to create the impression of inaction, buying time before Clinton might attempt to send reinforcements to Cornwallis.

Once the British learned that Barras had left Newport, they concluded the Chesapeake was likely the true objective of the French fleets. By 31 August, Graves had brought his five ships out of New York Harbor to join forces with Hood. Assuming command of this combined fleet of nineteen ships, Graves turned south and reached the Chesapeake's mouth by 5 September. His advance was hampered by delays, since several of the West Indies ships proved to be in poor condition despite Hood's assurances that his fleet could endure a month at sea, forcing repairs along the way. Graves also worried about vessels within his own command, particularly the Europe, which struggled with handling throughout the voyage.

Battle lines form

Around 9:30 in the morning, scouting frigates from both nations caught sight of each other's fleets, and confusion followed, since each side initially misjudged the other's numbers and assumed they were looking at de Barras' smaller force. Once the actual scale of the opposing fleets became clear, Graves concluded that de Grasse and Barras must already have combined their forces, so he readied himself for combat, steering his line toward the entrance of the bay with help from winds blowing out of the north-northeast.

De Grasse, meanwhile, had sent a handful of vessels off to blockade the York and James Rivers further inland, and numerous ships still riding at anchor were short of officers, crew, and boats at the moment the British fleet came into view. This left him with a genuinely awkward task: forming a battle line while pushing against an incoming tide, under wind and shore conditions that forced him onto a tack running opposite to that of his opponents. At 11:30 that morning, twenty-four French vessels severed their anchor cables and rode the noon tide out of the bay, abandoning shore parties and small boats in the process. Several ships were so critically shorthanded, some lacking as many as two hundred men, that crews could not work every gun aboard. As his vessels cleared the bay, de Grasse had instructed them to fall into a line according to how fast each could sail, disregarding their customary order. The Auguste, under Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville, numbered among the first ships to emerge. Bougainville, leading a squadron of three additional ships, pulled so far ahead of the remaining French vessels that by 3:45 in the afternoon the British had an opening wide enough to have severed his group from the rest of the fleet.

By one o'clock, the two fleets stood roughly opposite one another, though sailing on opposing tacks. Seeking to bring on an engagement while steering clear of shoals called the Middle Ground near the bay's entrance, Graves at about two o'clock ordered his entire fleet to wear about, a movement that inverted his battle line but let it match up against the French ships as they emerged from the bay. The consequence was that Hood, his most combative subordinate, now commanded the rear of the line, while Rear-Admiral of the Red Francis Samuel Drake took the vanguard.

Both fleets were now heading generally eastward, pulling away from the bay, with the wind still coming from the north-northeast. The converging lines meant that the foremost ships in each van came within firing range of one another, even as the vessels toward the rear remained too distant to take part. The French held an edge in firepower here, because conditions allowed them to open their lower gun ports, whereas the British were forced to keep theirs shut to prevent flooding on the lower decks. Beyond this, the French fleet was better maintained overall, possessed more ships and a greater total of guns, and carried heavier ordnance capable of firing a heavier weight of shot. Among the British vessels, Ajax and Terrible, both part of the West Indies squadron and among those most heavily involved in the fighting, were in rather poor shape. Graves failed at this juncture to exploit the vulnerability created by the isolated French van, since as his own centre and rear ships closed on the British line, they simultaneously closed the gap toward their own leading ships. As one British witness put it, the entire fleet watched in astonishment as the French center was allowed to bear down and support its van without interference.

Because the two lines needed to become truly parallel before a full engagement could occur, Graves ended up issuing signals that contradicted one another. Crucially, Hood, commanding the rear squadron, read these signals in a manner that ran counter to what Graves had intended. No option available for narrowing the angle between the fleets offered a clean solution: bringing ships nearer would restrict them to firing only their bow guns, and could leave their decks exposed to raking fire from the enemy. Graves ran up two signals simultaneously: "line ahead," which called for ships to gradually close the distance and straighten out once parallel to the enemy, and "close action," which typically meant ships should steer straight for the enemy's line and turn only once within suitable range. Together, these conflicting orders caused his ships to enter the fight in a fragmented, piecemeal fashion. Hood took the order to preserve line of battle as taking priority over the close action signal,